engaged his contemplative habits. He looked around on living
scenes no longer through the dim spectacles of the old comedy, and he
projected a new species, which was no longer to depend on its conventional
grotesque personages and its forced incidents; he aspired to please a more
critical audience by making his dialogue the conversation of society, and
his characters its portraits.

Introduced to the literary coterie of the Hotel de Rambouillet, a new view
opened on the favoured poet. To occupy a seat in this envied circle was a
distinction in society. The professed object of this reunion of nobility
and literary persons, at the hotel of the Marchioness of Rambouillet, was
to give a higher tone to all France, by the cultivation of the language,
the intellectual refinement of their compositions, and last, but not
least, to inculcate the extremest delicacy of manners. The recent civil
dissensions had often violated the urbanity of the court, and a grossness
prevailed in conversation which offended the scrupulous. This critical
circle was composed of both sexes. They were to be the arbiters of taste,
the legislators of criticism, and, what was less tolerable, the models of
genius. No work was to be stamped into currency which bore not the
mint-mark of the hotel.

In the annals of fashion and literature no coterie has presented a more
instructive and amusing exhibition of the abuses of learning, and the
aberrations of ill-regulated imaginations, than the Hotel de Rambouillet,
by its ingenious absurdities. Their excellent design to refine the
language, the manners, and even morality itself, branched out into every
species of false refinement; their science ran into trivial pedantries,
their style into a fantastic jargon, and their spiritualising delicacy
into the very puritanism of prudery. Their frivolous distinction between
the mind and the heart, which could not always be made to go together,
often perplexed them as much as their own jargon, which was not always
intelligible, even to the initiated. The French Academy is said to have
originated in the first meetings of the Hotel de Rambouillet; and it is
probable that some sense and taste, in its earliest days, may have visited
this society, for we do not begin such refined follies without some show
of reason.

The local genius of the hotel was feminine, though the most glorious men
of the literature of France were among its votaries. The great magnet was
the famed Made